A gym trainer is found dead inside a club of the ultra-rich in Homi Adajania’s recent film, the mystery Murder Mubarak on Netflix. Bhavani Singh, an intelligent senior cop with a sense of humour, starts investigating the case. The story becomes increasingly complicated, and we watch the cop closely until the mystery ends with the answer we want and get.
Circa 2012. Anurag Kashyap’s crime drama Gangs of Wasseypur begins with a violent sequence. A group of men led by one Sultan Qureshi surround a small house inside a lane at night. They start shooting and hurling handmade bombs with the intention of killing one Faisal Khan, who lives in the house. After he is convinced that Khan is dead, Sultan asks his men to leave. He says, “Gaya Faisal Khan Bhhitrampur. Chalo bey.” (Faisal Khan is no more. Let us go). A butcher by profession, Sultan is a ruthless man who does not hesitate to kill his sister in a shocking sequence later in the film. His character is vastly different from the cop’s in Murder Mubarak. Common to both is the conviction with which Pankaj Tripathi has played them.
Born in Belsand, a village in Gopalganj district in Bihar, Pankaj Tripathi has emerged as a sought-after actor in Hindi cinema. Forty-seven years old, the actor shared a touching story in the second season of The Kapil Sharma Show when he was a guest along with his idol and professional senior Manoj Bajpayee and poet Kumar Vishwas.
Having studied at the Institute of Hotel Management in Hajipur, a city in Bihar’s Vaishali district, Tripathi was working as a kitchen supervisor at Hotel Maurya in Patna. He was ecstatic when Bajpayee stayed in the hotel. After he checked out, somebody from the housekeeping department discovered that he had left his pair of slippers behind. Tripathi managed to get hold of the pair and kept them with him as precious memorabilia. The actor could not hold back his tears when he was telling the story. Bajpayee responded by leaving his chair and giving him a warm hug. It was the most moving moment ever on Kapil Sharma’s talk show.
The soft-spoken Tripathi did farming with his father in his village during schooldays. He married his girlfriend Mridula in 2004 and moved to Mumbai to find work in the film industry. After he reached Mumbai, he experienced the real meaning of struggle in the film industry. The actor, who has also studied at the National School Drama in New Delhi, appeared on the big screen for the first time in an uncredited role in TS Nagabharana’s Kannada language film Chigurida Kanusu, followed by another uncredited role in Jeeva’s Run (2004), his debut in Bollywood starring Abhishek Bachchan and Bhumika Chawla. While Tripathi tried to find work, his supportive wife Mridula taught children and paid the bills. Their daughter Aashi was born in 2006. Thirty years old, success was to elude him for several years.
Frank and honest, Tripathi had once said in an episode of Kaun Banega Crorepati that he had come to Mumbai in 2004 and Gangs of Wasseypur made him a familiar face in 2012. “For eight years, no one knew what I was doing,” he said. Today, few will remember his minor roles in Shaad Ali’s Bunty Aur Babli, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara and Mani Ratnam’s Raavan in the early part of his career. He also found work in TV serials like Time Bomb 9/11 on Zee TV and Powder on Sony TV. For a long time, he was like most other fellow actors: a barely distinguishable face in the crowd.
More than a decade after he appeared on Gangs of Wasseypur, Tripathi is among the busiest and finest actors in the business. He has played a wide range of characters, and the best instances from his body of work reveal his ease in front of the camera. While Tripathi has also appeared in meaty roles in OTT productions, he has become a household name because of his performances in films.
Like all good actors, Tripathi imparts a distinct personality to his characters with subtle changes in dialogue delivery, body language and facial expressions. He nailed the part of a real estate baron in Shanker Raman’s thriller Gurgaon. He was flawless as the cynical paramilitary officer in Amit V Masurkar’s satire Newton. He was consistently funny as the know-it-all bookshop owner in Amar Kaushik’s horror comedy Stree, natural as always as a taxi driver in Laxman Utekar’s comedy-drama Mimi revolving around surrogate motherhood, and particularly impressive as a Shiv bhakt shopkeeper forced to take legal action after his son’s expulsion from school in Amit Rai’s social drama OMG 2.
Tripathi also enjoys working in web series, because, as he had once shared with this writer, the long format is an opportunity for exploring a character in greater detail. One of the biggest OTT stars, he has made his presence felt as the manipulative Guruji in the two seasons of the crime thriller Sacred Games on Netflix, excelled in the pivotal role of a businessman and a mafia don in the crime drama Mirzapur on Amazon Prime, and been equally good as a lawyer in the three seasons of the legal drama Criminal Justice on Disney+ Hotstar.
A winner of several awards, including the National Film Award – Special Mention for Newton and the National Film Award – Best Supporting Actor Award for Mimi, Pankaj Tripathi has come a long way in a short time. His story is neither the first nor the last of its kind, but it is an inspiration for those from small towns seeking opportunities in Bollywood.
The writer, a journalist for three decades, writes on literature and pop culture. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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